Fan's Eye View ~ Cheating The Cat

With the news coming down last Tuesday that Sprint Cup Series driver Ryan Newman, car owner Richard Childress, and Crew Chief Luke Lambert would all be heavily penalized for infractions related to tampering with the tires on the No. 31 machine, there seemed to be, as usual, a split amongst the fans as to their stance on cheating and innovation, or as we have become familiar with saying, the gray area. Now, make no mistake, the sport was built on playing around in that sandbox with rubber walls.Smokey Yunick made a career out of it, and some say that Chad Knaus still does.Heck, I think about two of the most recent cats in some of the tallest seats at the NASCAR table, and I’m talking about one time Technical Director Gary Nelson and current Vice President of Competition, Robin Pemberton, and I remember a few times when they got their hands smacked for stretching the rules more than they were meant to be stretched. That NASCAR rule book that they used, however, was not as taut as it is right now.It had a lot of white space in it, the pages were held together with a paperclip, and the front and back covers were made with leftover programs from the second race at Dover in 1974.Now, we’d need to carry that tableted tome in the Ark of the Covenant.There’s so many rules in there it makes the NFL rule book look like a copy of the first Spiderman comic book ever printed.So, there’s a lot less wiggle room now than there was then. But we’re still trying to wiggle, apparently. Y’all ever seen or been in quicksand?I mean real quicksand?One wrong step and you’re knee deep, and not in the water somewhere.It’s a mixture of loose sand and water, and it has no tension to support, so you slide right into it.And then…you start to wiggle.You tell yourself you can get out, and you wiggle.And wiggle.And wiggle.And pretty soon, you find out that all that wiggling is working, and instead of being knee deep, you’re thigh deep. Hey, wait a minute…we’re going in the wrong direction. So, the latest version of the quicksand that Ryan Newman and his team have found themselves trying to wiggle in is this process of bleeding air pressure from the tires.It’s the highly technical act of punching small holes, pin size holes mind you, into the tire at various places in various patterns.Now, what this does is when the tire compresses in the corner, that small pinhole, which is not large enough to bleed the air under normal stress, will in conjunction with the stress of car in motion, slightly open, and poof!One little tiny almost unnoticeable Goodyear tire fart. Think about balloons.You know the game when you blow up a balloon and hold the end closed, no air comes out, but if you relax the grip just a little bit, the same way a tire relaxes its grip on the hole when under stress, some air comes out.And then of course you let it go and the balloon flies all over the place and everyone laughs hysterically at something stupid and bedlam ensues.Same concept, really.You’re opening up a gap for air to escape where there was previously no gap.The major difference between the balloon game and purposefully poking holes into a NASCAR regulated tire is that the hole-poking isn’t legal according to NASCAR.I’m pretty sure they don’t care what you do with the balloon. There is, my friends, an inherent molecule in the DNA of our sport that forces the competitors to play around in that gray area, and a lot of times outside of it, in order to get an advantage over the other competitors.The only problem with that, however, is that the more and more of the blank area in NASCAR’s rule book that gets filled in, the less gray area we have.(Now, this is a different story for a different time, but when all of that gray area is gone, yours truly believes that our sport will “reboot” so to speak, and we’re going to have a sport we’re familiar with, but very different when it comes to innovation, rules, and following them. Or not.) So, what’s left then?There’s nothing left, nothing, except for trying to build a better mousetrap, and doing so without pissing off the cat.The problem is that the cat is no dummy and it thinks the mousetrap in play is fine just the way it is, for the most part.But our sport continues to be what it is, and that’s one of growth and innovation and, yes, if you will, breaking the rules, and therefore cheating.These guys just keep trying, though, and hoping the cat is under the influence of the nip, and misses whatever they’ve done.

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